Ars Technicast Episode 24–Is it time to move into our Facebook Home?

How much Facebook is too much Facebook? Hey, for some, there's never enough.

Facebook announced Facebook Home last week, and it wants users to get very cozy. So cozy that your friends' news feed updates will take over the home screen of the phone, putting Facebook at the forefront of the OS. We reviewed both the features of Facebook Home and its flagship HTC First phone. Since our review, Facebook Home has been released and can now be downloaded and installed.

In this episode of the Ars Technicast, we talk about the specs and features of the HTC handset that comes pre-loaded with Facebook Home. As we discuss Facebook Home itself, we talk about user experience, messaging habits, and what we do and don’t want in our feeds and other social services. Join host Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Reviews Editor Florence Ion, Contributor Andrew Cunningham, and Social Editor Cesar Torres in this episode that touches on social networking, smartphones, and the way we connect.

Do you plan to get Facebook Home on your smartphone, or do you prefer some other social network or method of communicating? Tell us in the comments below. If you don’t use social networking tools, let us know why.

Promoted Comments

My wife uses Facebook constantly so I figured she might be interested. Within 15 minutes she asked me to uninstall it on her S3. She didn't like the lack of configurable options and was especially annoyed by the zoomed in panning of pictures you can't disable. She also didn't like her news feed showing in the lock screen like many people have already noted concern over.

So Facebook, your target audience thinks this sucks, and this is before you probably plan to insert ads between every other page a person navigates through.

14 posts | registered Aug 21, 2008

Cesar Torres
Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City. Emailcesar.torres@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Urraca

Nothing annoys me more than business or projects that elect to use Facebook as their means of interacting with their potential customers. If I am interested in Company X, I'm willing to make an account on Company X's forums to deal with them. Requiring me to deal with Company Y is a mistake, regardless of how convenient it is to not have to set up your own infrastructure. Hosted solutions are one thing, but relying on a system that openly is about mining and marketing your potential customers' information is entirely another. It's bad business and regardless of if Facebook is appropriate for personal use, it shouldn't be used for business use.

I look at Facebook maybe 2-3 times a month just to keep up with some old friends that are no longer nearby. I took the app off my phone as I was uninterested in getting constant notifications. I frankly have gotten tired of so many people using Facebook like Twitter and as a soapbox. I use Google + for family only contact.

My wife uses Facebook constantly so I figured she might be interested. Within 15 minutes she asked me to uninstall it on her S3. She didn't like the lack of configurable options and was especially annoyed by the zoomed in panning of pictures you can't disable. She also didn't like her news feed showing in the lock screen like many people have already noted concern over.

So Facebook, your target audience thinks this sucks, and this is before you probably plan to insert ads between every other page a person navigates through.

I do use FB but I keep no one in my close friends list just to keep from getting notifications on who had what for dinner. I also have twitter on my phone but rarely look at it. I like FB but I have my own life going on. I do use Google now which is pertinent to what I am doing - direction, weather, even "time tos" - more if I wanted but I don't.

I have a smartphone but I don't have time to spend my time following updates all day. BTW I also turn the ringer off my phone at night and actually leave it home at times.

I took one look at the permissions and said, "Ah, no thanks." I mean, do you really want your friends posted pics scrolling across your lockscreen?I enjoy FB for what it is, but via the browser will do for me.

Nothing annoys me more than business or projects that elect to use Facebook as their means of interacting with their potential customers. If I am interested in Company X, I'm willing to make an account on Company X's forums to deal with them. Requiring me to deal with Company Y is a mistake, regardless of how convenient it is to not have to set up your own infrastructure. Hosted solutions are one thing, but relying on a system that openly is about mining and marketing your potential customers' information is entirely another. It's bad business and regardless of if Facebook is appropriate for personal use, it shouldn't be used for business use.

While I don't have a Facebook account myself either, I do think you may be taking a too simplistic view here. The biggest gain to using Facebook to these companies is not not having to do their own infrastructure. The real gain is the lower barrier to contact for all the people that do have Facebook, which seems to be a majority of the online population now.

You and I may not like it, but the experience is simply optimized for the majority of customers, who do now not need to bother about creating separate accounts for several forums. And frankly, as long as I can still pick up the phone or send an old-fashioned e-mail for real customer service I'm not that bothered about the situation.

Usually I have facebook set up to just email me whenever anyone comments on crap I post, and besides that I rarely look at my stream; I have it bookmarked nowhere and have to get to it manually. When Home was announced, I decided to see what it was like to increase the integration into my life - so I turned off email notifications, forcing me to visit the site to see anything, and put a link to it on my new tab page.

Since then I've gone to facebook like 5x more and viewed about a hundred times more posts. I have to say...I am so much worse at getting things done. I see little use in having MORE facebook around; to me it's like decreasing the amount that you're you in favor of increasing the amount that you absorb other peoples' personalities. Is this a good thing?

teens everywhere rejoice. As for the rest of us, this is completely useless.

i've had plenty of 40+ y/o's tell me, "i don't know how to use the internet except for facebook and email." most of them are female (no hate, it's just what i've seen). gender balance for "i only know facebook and email" evens out around 60-70. Under 40, it's all over the map.

it actually reminds me of a soil or ice core sample. if you go back far enough, men are just as clueless about internets as women, but 40-60yo women don't really seem to feel as comfortable with it as 40-60yo men. probably due to upbringing.

I basically use facebook for chatting with friends and avoiding texting costs so this is not super interesting to me. The new interface stuff seems bloated and annoying.

I updated my android facebook app this weekend to find that it has some annoying new floating icons and a new message interface that supposedly 'floats' over other apps. I guess you are supposed to message without leaving the other app you are in. In effect, it just covers up about 80% of the other app, rendering it useless and makes everything much slower. Of course, there are a round of new bugs that cause the on screen keyboard to disappear at times and other issues.

Why is it even multi-billion dollar companies can't seem to understand that a new feature now and then is great but if you sacrifice core functionality, reliability and performance in favor of some new thing that only a tiny corner of your market cares about, you are only hurting your users and therefor yourself.

I was due to replace my handset today. This just made the decision to replace my craptastic Android with an iPhone 5 soooo much easier

That doesn't really make much sense. What does the facebook home software have to do with that, since you can access facebook on either but iPhone removes even the choice to use the new facebook interface?

Oh, yes please - PLEASE turn my phone into a dedicated portal of pictures I don't want, "updates" I couldn't care less about, and all the ads and data mining you can throw at me. I would like that very much.

I was due to replace my handset today. This just made the decision to replace my craptastic Android with an iPhone 5 soooo much easier

That doesn't really make much sense. What does the facebook home software have to do with that, since you can access facebook on either but iPhone removes even the choice to use the new facebook interface?

I've thought through the long term implications of allowing Google/Facebook to data mine my entire life.

When I started a trial of Android I began with a fresh gmail account just for the purpose. As soon as I started installing apps I began getting vile spam. Then I discovered that Google hands over my personal details to every app developer. Neither Apple nor Microsoft nor Blackberry do this.

I don't want to contribute to the success of such a platform. Besides, Android is a really second rate experience compared to iOS & WP8 is still racing to catch up, so no contest really.

Oh, yes please - PLEASE turn my phone into a dedicated portal of pictures I don't want, "updates" I couldn't care less about, and all the ads and data mining you can throw at me. I would like that very much.

Don't forget - regurgitated memes that weren't funny 5 years ago and are even less funny now. I'm seriously thinking about just deleting my Facebook profile. It seems to take normal people and makes them unable to articulate their own thoughts and feelings.

For me, FB has become way to political (via my "friends" of course). It would be one thing to see pictures of my friends kids popping up on my lockscreen. It's quite another to see all the images containing mainly text in the form of political sound bites. I don't have the slightest interest in using my lockscreen to advertise views for/against guns, immigration or welfare. After that, the promised forthcoming FB advertising on my lockscreen would be an almost welcome change.

I was due to replace my handset today. This just made the decision to replace my craptastic Android with an iPhone 5 soooo much easier

That doesn't really make much sense. What does the facebook home software have to do with that, since you can access facebook on either but iPhone removes even the choice to use the new facebook interface?

I've thought through the long term implications of allowing Google/Facebook to data mine my entire life.

When I started a trial of Android I began with a fresh gmail account just for the purpose. As soon as I started installing apps I began getting vile spam. Then I discovered that Google hands over my personal details to every app developer. Neither Apple nor Microsoft nor Blackberry do this.

I don't want to contribute to the success of such a platform. Besides, Android is a really second rate experience compared to iOS & WP8 is still racing to catch up, so no contest really.

I have to say that I've been using Android since 2010 linked to a Google account I've had even longer and as far as I can tell I've yet to receive a single email as a result of an app that I installed on one of the Android phones I've had (and I've installed well over 100 apps over that time frame and currently have more than 70 on my phone). Not sure why you got spam messages but unless you were installing apps that were obviously junk you shouldn't have gotten any unwanted email.

As far a Facebook Home is concerned, it really only makes sense if Facebook is the center of your mobile experience. It isn't the center of my mobile world so I have no need for it.

For me, FB has become way to political (via my "friends" of course). It would be one thing to see pictures of my friends kids popping up on my lockscreen. It's quite another to see all the images containing mainly text in the form of political sound bites. I don't have the slightest interest in using my lockscreen to advertise views for/against guns, immigration or welfare. After that, the promised forthcoming FB advertising on my lockscreen would be an almost welcome change.

As much as I dislike Facebook, and the look of this software, I don't think you can blame them for this. It sounds like you need a better peer group, sadly.